A couple of days ago, I dug out my old laptop, the screen of which had given up the ghost a few months ago, and switched it on. To my surprise, it was working perfectly, which is great, because my work laptop is about to be taken away as they roll out a load of extremely fast desktops. Great for work, not so great for me. But at least my old laptop has decided not to be broken any more.

For the last year or so, since I had my nice new work laptop, I’ve been running openSUSE on an external USB hard drive (which surprisingly, benchmarked faster than using the internal drive), and I’ve been using KDE 4.0. I know my last post on this blog said I’d reverted to 3.5, but I tried 4.0.1 when it came out (or possible 4.0.2?), and discovered the actual show stoppers had been fixed, and the irritations were small enough I could live with them.

Anyway, onto the ‘wow’. Since my old laptop had a clean install of openSUSE 10.3 on it and I didn’t mind about messing it up with an unstable version of KDE, I put the unstable KDE snapshot version on instead of 4.0. And I think the word which best sums it up is ‘Wow’. It’s really, really good.

There are some bits in particular that I liked: being able to resize the panel; the panel for icons on the desktop; the beautiful highlight for icons; the alt-f2 thingy (I can never remember its proper name) which is brilliant, and looks and works so well I keep pressing alt-f2 and typing stuff in even though I don’t need to run any programmes; the way you can style plasma easily; the way plasma styles work so much better than before; the pim programmes being KDE4ified; the sounds; the plus/minus symbols for selecting/deselecting icons (brilliant idea); everything seems more responsive (even on this old laptop); things looking good even without compositing switched on…

So, great job everyone. This beta is fantastic.

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What IronRuby Running Rails *REALLY* Means and Why Miguel de Icaza Deserves The Credit

Grats to Miguel

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Pass the sick bag again.

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• Off to the market, shopping; home - back to bed. Up, lunch,
  out with N. & M. to the playground while H. went to Keziah’s
  party. More cycling practice in the afternoon, some useful slugging.

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I’ve been continuing to make improvements to the API over the past few days and have just made a 2.3.1 release.

The main focus of this release has been a redesign of the header API which has been nagging at me for quite a while now. To fix it, I’ve done the following:

• Renamed GMimeHeader to GMimeHeaderList, GMimeHeader felt more like it should be a single header (name/value pair).
• Introduced a new GMimeHeader, altho it is internal only at the moment. I had originally planned on making it public (hence the rename of the old GMimeHeader struct).
• Introduced a GMimeHeaderIter which can be used to iterate forward and backward over the headers, allowing you to change header values (but not names). It also allows removal of headers which makes it possible to remove any header you want, whereas the old API would only let you remove a header by name (which was a problem if there was more than 1 by the same name).
• Got rid of g_mime_header_foreach() because that API sucked and has been replaced by the far more useful GMimeHeaderIter API.

The GMimeHeaderIter API looks like this:

GMimeHeaderIter *g_mime_header_iter_copy (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);void g_mime_header_iter_free (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);

bool g_mime_header_iter_equal (GMimeHeaderIter *iter1, GMimeHeaderIter *iter2);

bool g_mime_header_iter_is_valid (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);

bool g_mime_header_iter_first (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);bool g_mime_header_iter_last (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);

bool g_mime_header_iter_next (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);bool g_mime_header_iter_prev (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);

gint64 g_mime_header_iter_get_offset (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);const char *g_mime_header_iter_get_name (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);bool g_mime_header_iter_set_value (GMimeHeaderIter *iter, const char *value);const char *g_mime_header_iter_get_value (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);

/* if the iter is valid, removes the current header and advances    to the next - returns TRUE on success or FALSE otherwise */bool g_mime_header_iter_remove (GMimeHeaderIter *iter);

Currently, the way to get a GMimeHeaderIter is to call g_mime_header_list_get_iter() which returns a newly allocated iter. I’m not sure if this is the best API or not tho… some other thoughts I’ve had are:

GMimeHeaderIter *g_mime_header_iter_new (void);bool g_mime_header_list_get_iter (GMimeHeaderList *list, GMimeHeaderIter *iter);

The second function would initialize iter and return TRUE, or, if list was empty, it could return FALSE.

Another option would be to just have:

GMimeHeaderIter *g_mime_header_iter_new (GMimeHeaderList *list);

Then, if list is empty you’d just get back an invalidated iter. If, later, headers were added to list, then perhaps the iter could auto-magically become valid again. This would more-or-less work the same as the current code - except that the way to instantiate a GMimeHeaderIter is different.

To be honest, now that I’ve written these 2 ideas down, I think I prefer the first idea.

So… iterators. Since you can have multiple iterators for the same GMimeHeaderList, it is important to invalidate them on at least two occasions:

• when the GMimeHeaderList is destroyed
• when the header that an iter points to is removed; either by a call to g_mime_header_list_remove() or via a call to g_mime_header_iter_remove() on another iter instance.

You’ll be pleased to note that only iters that reference a header that got removed are invalidated. This fact seems to be an argument in favor of my first idea above, as it would allow re-use of iters once they get invalidated.

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There’s been poker shown on TV over here for a few years now so why am I saying that it’s coming of age now? Well, previously the coverage fell into two categories.

1. You could watch contrived, studio-bound poker late night on Channel 4.
2. You could watch the “real thing” - the big tournaments from real poker rooms - on obscure digital channels

Well, now the European Poker Tour has come to Channel 4 (still late at night but that’s what DVRs are for).

At the same time, the World Series has just started at the Rio.

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So the time has come. OpenSUSE is now in release canidate cycle, and VMWare has released VMWare Workstation 6.0.4 which will work on openSUSE 11.0 natively (without the need of the vmware-any-any patch for 2.6.25 kernel).
I have created a new wiki just for openSUSE 11.0 and VMWare Workstation 6.0.4.
You can find it here in […]

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In earlier post, I’m writing “How to build openSUSE LiveUSB with Kiwi” tutorial guide and thinking how to get same results with more easier tips. Another distro came with easy trick to make a bootable LiveUSB and I think openSUSE should be . Kiwi is a great tools for making openSUSE liveUSB, QEMU Image, VMWare Image, XEN Image and LiveCD Image but it would not fit with any situation.

I’ve search various topics and found some of them looks pretty interesting to try. After reviewing some tips, here is a tutorial guide to make openSUSE 11.0 LiveUSB with the easiest way :

BENEFIT

1. Tutorial can be used on Linux or Windows
2. Do not need to install openSUSE onto hard disk for making LiveUSB as it was with KIWI. Just download the LiveCD ISO image and a tools for make an extract of ISO content (7-zip on Windows and mount -o loop tips on Linux)
3. Can used FAT 32 file system for interoperability (marketing hype ) and mobility of data. Flash disk could be accessing by various OS
4. Simple, only need a few step
5. Fast process, required a few minutes for copying ISO image and initrd process

PREPARATION

1. Preparing USB Flash Disk, 1 GB or more
2. If using Windows for making LiveCD, download latest version of syslinux
3. Download modified initrd - called initrdud - from this link. (it’s free ftp server which deleted any contents every 2 week. You could find another location from my personal blog uploads folder). The modified initrd contains modification from LiveCD boot into LiveUSB boot and addon for NLS modules (code page and character set) for FAT32 file system on USB

MAKE A BOOTABLE LIVEUSB

• ON WINDOWS

1. Run your Windows OS
2. Plug in USB Flash Disk
3. Extract syslinux on Windows folder
4. Open DOS Prompt (Command Prompt)
5. Navigate into win32 folder on syslinux folder
6. run syslinux -ma driver-letter-of-flash-disk, eg : syslinux -ma E: if E is your USB Flash Disk. Note : The process need a few second to make a bootable USB disk with syslinux, so don’t wait the process finished for 1 minutes or more

• ON LINUX
  1. Find your USB disk with df -h on konsole.
  2. Install syslinux and run syslinux /dev/sdx from konsole where /dev/sdx is your USB device
  3. If the above process failed for making bootable USB disk, try another tips

PROCESSING THE IMAGE

1. Plug in bootable USB disk
2. Create temporary folder for mounting LiveCD ISO Image mkdir liveiso
3. Mount ISO image into specified folder mount -o loop openSUSE-11.0-RC1-KDE4-LiveCD-i386.iso liveiso/ (I’m currently using openSUSE 11.0 RC1 KDE. Make a proper changes to your ISO image)
4. Copying all of liveiso content (mounted ISO content) into USB disk
5. Copying all of content on boot/i386/loader folder into root folder of USB disk
6. Rename isolinux.cfg on root folder of USB disk into syslinux.cfg
7. copying initrdud into root folder of usb disk
8. Make a few modification into syslinux.cfg, so, USB live will boot with initrdud. Make a change to this line : append initrd=initrd ramdisk_size=512000 ramdisk_blocksize=4096 splash=silent showopts into append initrd=initrdud kiwidebug=1 ramdisk_size=512000 ramdisk_blocksize=4096 splash=silent showopts kiwidebug=1 option will log any error while booting LiveUSB

TESTING

1. Boot your computer with USB HDD as top of boot device priority or make a hot boot change by pressing F12, F8, F9 or any key according to your computer
2. While booting, just press ENTER on boot option. Typing Live-System as mentioned on boot message will failed regarding kernel image

LIVEUSB INSTALLATION SCREENSHOT

Below are some LiveUSB installation screenshot.

CREDIT

Thanks to Manivas for great idea & tutorial.

FUTURE IDEA

Coolo was discarded his experimental test for making openSUSE liveUSB. The above process should be fine and *I think* quite enough to provide openSUSE LiveUSB for 11.0 released. By automating overall process and making a nice GUI, it should be increasing openSUSE 11.0 features. (if you asked me, “Why don’t you create automated process tools by yourself”, my answer is : “Yes, I will. I just thinking that it may need a less than a day for experience openSUSE developers for making the tools rather than waiting my C++ & QT course finished )

In 10.3, it was need a month after official release of 10.3 on October 04, 2008 for releasing LiveCD version of openSUSE. With this experience, is this possible to make this features included on openSUSE 11.0 ?

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• Cooked breakfast; more practice with H. - now getting remarkably
  good at balancing - counting her progress in paces of un-interrupted
  bicycle free-wheeling.
• Packed, and drove home; more practice in the street - discovered
  the brake chaffing the (somewhat bent) front wheel, and fixing this
  doubled H.’s best-distance to 70+ paces: nice.
• DVD for the children, combined with efforts to write a covering
  letter describing the building work we want done; failed. J. out
  baby-sitting, and got back to it - alternating with E-mail and so on.

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Just confirmed my flight to Istanbul to attend GUADEC! I’m arriving a day early and staying almost a week afterward, so if there are any adventurers or locals who want to hang out, share accommodations, show me around, or take a mini beach vacation, I’d love to hear from you! I’m really looking forward to veggie moussaka, hummus, coffee, seeing friends, and making new ones.

Aaron and I missed the call-for-papers so we aren’t booked for a normal speaking slot. Does anybody know what we can do at this point to either speak or hold one or more Banshee sessions? Is there a waiting list for speaker cancellations, or a BoF signup, etc? Thanks!

(BTW, you can follow me on twitter! I know, I’m just making your day!)

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